Royal Free London NHS Trust on paperless trail

Department of Health has digital strategy to make NHS paperless by 2018

By CIO Staff

March 13, 2014

CIO UK

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The Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust is rolling out a new hub to store, manage and make available digitised copies of its paper care records as it tries to fulfil the Department of Health's Digital Health Strategy to make the NHS paperless by 2018.

The NHS Trust, which treats around 700,000 patients each year, will use the OpenText Content Suite to manage all patient information and records, including images and unstructured data and which will be deployed hospital-wide this summer.

Director of information management and technology at the Royal Free, Will Smart, said: "Accurate and timely patient data is at the heart of delivering quality care and through our collaboration with OpenText we will ensure that it will be available to all front line care staff where and when it is required.

"For a complex hospital environment like ours, managing patient care using paper case-notes has been logistically very challenging. Tracking and moving paper case notes across a large physical estate has made it difficult to ensure that these are available where and when they are needed and has required a large administrative team.

"By digitising these case-notes we have the opportunity to improve the quality of the services we provide whilst reducing costs, and believe the new platform will enable us to digitise other paper-based corporate records and drive further efficiencies."